I'd been up since four.
Juniper—Sawyer's best quarter horse, left behind when he went to California—had been restless since midnight and I'd known by two that it was happening. I'd texted Gage and set up in the foaling stall and waited, which was the job. Mostly the job was waiting.
The foal had come just before sunrise. A filly, dark bay, all legs, exactly as ungainly and perfect as they always were. Juniper had done everything right. I'd only needed to be there, which was sometimes all it took.
Now it was close to eight and the filly was nursing and I was crouched in the corner of the stall with my forearms on my knees just watching, the way I always did in the first hours. Making sure. The barn was warm and smelled like hay and horse and the particular smell of something brand new, and it was quiet except for the sounds a mare made with her foal—low and private, not meant for anyone else.
I was tired. Happy, the way I got after a good birth. It was a specific kind of happy that didn't ask anything of me.
I thought about Haven.
Not on purpose. I never thought about her on purpose anymore—she just showed up, the way she'd been showing up for two or three years, slipping past whatever I'd tried to put between us. I thought about last Tuesday morning, her in my bed watching me pull my shirt on, hair everywhere, eyes still heavy. Good food going cold on the table because we'd gotten distracted.
Her voice in the dark sayingthis is my favorite night I've ever hadtwo months ago, and the nights getting better ever since.
I wished she was here.
The filly took a wobbly step and caught herself and I watched her figure out her legs.
Juniper nosed her flank. Steady.I've got you.
I'd been telling myself for two months that this was what Haven wanted—the arrangement, the secrecy, the back gate. That she'd asked for exactly this and I was just giving her what she'd asked for. It had been a useful thing to tell myself.
The truth was I was the one who needed it to be an arrangement. Because an arrangement had edges. An arrangement was something you could end when you needed to, something that didn't ask you to be a particular kind of man, something that couldn't look at you one day and realize what it had signed up for.
Haven deserved someone who hadn't been carrying Fallujah around for eighteen years. Someone whose knee didn't ache every cold morning, who didn't wake up wrong sometimes and need a minute to remember where he was. Someone her own age, or close to it—someone who'd grow alongside her instead of watching her from seventeen years back like a man with his face pressed to a window.
She was twenty-one years old and she was going to be a hell of a vet and she had her whole life stacked up in front of her like a promise.
I was forty and I was already in love with her.
That was the thing I'd been not-saying for weeks. It sat in my chest now, plain and inconvenient, while the filly nursed and Juniper made her low private sounds and the barn stayed warm around me.
I was in love with Haven Sinclair and she was too young and too good and I had no business being the man she ended up with.
Footsteps sounded behind me, and I didn’t look up. Dakota had been coming by to check in every so often; he loved the horses damn near as much as Sawyer did, and he’d been in the barn with me most of the night. I raised my voice and stood, my knee creaking.
“Juniper’s doing fine,” I said, not looking. “Filly’s already moving, healthy?—”
“Wyatt.”
That wasn’t Dakota.
I turned, and I found Haven standing there in the morning light.
She’d only been gone maybe five hours…she’d left when I got up to tend to Juniper, and I hadn’t expected her back until tonight, given that she had class today.
Something was wrong.
I knew it before I’d even fully taken in the sight of her; her voice was too careful, too calm, and her hair was wet and bound into a hasty ponytail with stray strands falling around her face. She looked like she hadn’t slept a wink after she left.
“Hey,” I said, stepping out of the stall and latching it behind me. “Thought you had class.”
“I do.” She paused. “Or…I did. I’m not going.” Her eyes went to the filly and something in her face shifted, just for a second. “She’s beautiful.”
My heart stuttered. Something wasverywrong.
She was going to end it.
